If the idea of thinking about the ongoing push for health-care reform gives you a headache, you are not alone.

Before this thing is over, Washington will set some sort of record for expending the maximum amount of hot air for a minimum sort of result.

On the left, the most ardent proponents of national health care warn that if the most sweeping proposals are not adopted tomorrow, we'll all be dead of brain cancer by the end of this week.

Among right-wingers, the belief is that immediate death is preferable to life in a nation that even thinks about extending health-care benefits to the poor and the cash-strapped — let alone to the sick and the dying.

One reason that the health-care debate is so unsatisfying, so unproductive, is that politicians are too culture-bound. Just as generals too often plan for the future by re-imagining the last war, Washington can not seem to place current problems in a contemporary context.

For Republicans, that means crying "socialism" at the drop of an aspirin bottle. That may have worked to torpedo Hillary Clinton's massively imperfect health-care plan 15 years ago. But it is doubtful that it will work this time around.

You do not need a Nobel Prize in economics to realize that health-care costs are punishing businesses, and at the same time causing pain and anxiety to those workers lucky enough to be covered.

As for the increasing number of people not covered by some sort of plan, public opinion is trending in a way that finds this situation increasingly noxious. With unemployment threatening to exceed 10 percent nationwide, enough people who are covered fear that soon they, too, either will lose their protection or not be able to pay for it. This constituency of fear and apprehension is only going to increase.

The Democrats are prisoner of their own set of delusions. They mistake the nation's appetite for vigorous government intervention to halt a collapsing economy as an unconditional license to print money.

If the Republicans' big blunder is their underestimation of the degree to which the average American is hurting, the Democrats' big mistake is their failure to accurately assess just how damaged the economy is, how overburdened with debt is its every nook and cranny.

That miscalculation could prove fatal if the great economic implosion that began under Republican President George W. Bush continues long enough so that the Democrats, too, are tarred with its brush.

If the Republicans underestimate the need for health-care reform, and the Democrats miscalculate the nation's ability to pay for it, where does that leave the average Jane or John Doe?

The Phoenix goes to press just hours before President Barack Obama is to address the nation on Wednesday night. How should readers evaluate what he has to say?

First, be wary of any plan that promises to remedy all of the nation's needs in one fell swoop. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Snowe: A party of one US Senator Olympia Snowe has maneuvered herself into a position where she is the only hope Democrats have of getting a "bipartisan" agreement on healthcare reform.

Merchants of death Wall Street has found a new way to make a buck: buy up the life-insurance policies of the sick and the aged at a fraction of their cost, bundle them into bonds that will be sold to investors, and profit from them when the policy holders die sooner rather than later.

Rx for Barack President Barack Obama is taking his vacation not a moment too soon. As his painfully poor performance in the health-care debate shows, he is way off his game. He clearly needs some time to recharge his batteries.

Hey, hey, we're the Monkees The law of averages says if you put 100 monkeys in a room with 100 computers, they'll eventually write a workable national health-care bill. Apparently, that rule doesn't apply to 100 US senators.

The waiting game We know, we know: Last week, Olympia Snowe made history by being the only Republican in 2009 to vote for any sort of healthcare reform, even in committee-level draft language far from its final form.

Going to pot The state's medical-marijuana laws, which govern how patients can access pot for medical purposes, is on the brink of significant change.

Drugs and culture University of Southern Maine professor Wendy Chapkis usually studies, teaches, and writes about gender issues, so her latest non-fiction outing, Dying to Get High: Marijuana as Medicine , might seem like a bit of a departure.

On fire It’s rare to read or hear anything in any of the media that’s not in lockstep with the Public Health Commission and the movement it represents.

Hallelujah! The Democrats won and the Republicans lost. That, in a nutshell, is the bottom line.

Why ban smoking? This editorial originally appeared in the February 20, 1998 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

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